SputnikOn October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union sent the beach ball-sized satellite, Sputnik 1 into space. The launch grabbed the world’s attention because it was at the height of the Cold War.
Sputnik, the first thing that humans ever successfully sent into space.
A metal ball about two feet across with some antennae and a radio transmitter. Altogether, it weighed 184 pounds.
It completed one of its 98-minute orbits. Sputnik 1 would “beep-beep” for 22 days, all told.
Sputnik 2, the world’s second artificial satellite, launched on November 3. It was far beefier, weighing over 1,000 pounds.
February 1958 that the US would follow with Explorer 1, a squib of a satellite even smaller than Sputnik 1.
Photographic PlatesA photographic plate is a glass or metal sheet coated with a light-sensitive emulsion (like silver salts) used to capture images before digital sensors, serving as a stable negative for high-resolution photography, especially in early astronomy and scientific imaging
The famous photographic plates of Pluto are the glass negatives taken by Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in January 1930, which revealed the distant dwarf planet as a faint moving dot against static stars.
Donald MenzelDuring World War II, Menzel was commissioned as a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy and asked to head a division of intelligence, where he used his many-sided talents, including deciphering enemy codes.
After the war, he was appointed acting director of the Harvard Observatory in 1952 and was the full director from 1954 to 1966.
His colleague Dr. Dorrit Hoffleit recalls one of his first actions in the position was asking his secretary to destroy a third of the plates sight unseen, resulting in their permanent loss from the record.[5] The term "Menzel Gap" was used to refer to the 1953–1968 absence of astronomical photographic plates when plate-making operations were temporarily halted by Menzel as a cost-cutting measure.
Astronomer Dr. Beatriz VillarroelDr. Beatriz Villarroel found 100,000+ “light-reflecting objects” on photographic plates of the night sky from Palomar Observatory between 1947 and 1957.
These light-reflecting objects, or “transients,” are not comets, asteroids, or satellites.
Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey", published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, studied digital scans of the original Palomar photographic glass plates and determined that the frequency of the transients increased around the time of nuclear tests and purported civilian "UFO sightings".
Transients studied from July 1952, the same night as the famous Washington D.C. UFO flap.
Scientific Papers & Article- We Were Told There Is No Scientific Evidence for UFOs. Our Research Says Otherwise: https://www.liberationtimes.com/home/we-were-told-there-is-no-scientific-evidence-for-ufos-our-research-says-otherwise
- Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92162-7
- Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I) may be associated with nuclear testing and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3
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